Brad Warner's Blog, page 18

EMPTYING THE MIND?

I've been doing tons of interviews lately about my new book. Some of them have been really good. But most of the people who interview me don't let me know where I can find the interviews on line. Here's one that did:

Interview on Shambhala Sun Space

Also, my new column for Suicide Girls' new SFW (safe for work) blog is up here now. You guys have seen this article already. From next time (2 weeks from now) I'm gonna start submitting new stuff.

Here's something interesting a friend of mine sent me:



She told me she thought it was a parody at first. Unfortunately it's real. Is Yoga demonic?

The piece is really amazing in the way it offers a nice capsule view of all that is weird and wonderful in the way certain people on the religious right think of yoga and Buddhism.

You'll see that "Zen Booty-ism" (for that is what it sounds like the woman is saying) is condemned for encouraging people to empty their minds. Instead, we are told, Christianity asks us to "fill our mind with Christ."

I'm kind of curious as to where this notion that the object of Buddhism is to empty the mind actually comes from. Maybe there are Buddhist teachers out there somewhere who really do tell people to empty their minds. But I've never met one. The confusion may come from the use of the word "emptiness" to translate the concept of shunyata. So people know that these weirdos who are so into emptiness also sit silently for long periods of time, therefore they must be emptying their minds. Captain Kirk can tell you how horrifying it is to have your mind emptied.

This notion of filling one's mind with Christ is intriguing. It's hard to imagine what the person who mentions this on the video -- a psychologist no less! -- actually means. I have to guess that it means thinking and thinking and thinking about Christ. Perhaps one is to set up and fix an image of Christ in the mind, to imagine how he would perceive things, what he would do in various situations, his words and deeds as recorded in the Bible. One would then need to constantly compare oneself with this imaginary Christ. And, of course, no one could ever measure up.

Unfortunately, I think this is how some of us Buddhists deal with certain aspects of Buddhism. We agonize over whether we are measuring up to the standards set by the precepts or by the examples of the mythical great teachers of the past. Or we imagine that we ought to have an empty mind like folks in the video think we're trying to achieve and we beat ourselves up for not attaining true emptiness. We think we ought to be more mindful, more compassionate, more present. And damn it! We never quite get there! I know I have done a lot of this myself. It's because I grew up in a culture that held out this way of thinking as ideal.

But Buddhism isn't really demanding that we empty our minds or that we fill our minds with Buddha. It's asking us to honestly acknowledge who and what we actually are. In doing so, we can see clearly what we ought to do and ought not to do. Whether we can acknowledge this is another matter. Practice, practice, practice.


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OK. Some of you have noticed the donation button on the upper left corner of this page. Thanks! As a way of making it feel a bit like readers are getting something for their money, I'm going to start answering more questions sent in from you folks out there. Send your questions to:

askbradwarner@hotmail.com

...and I'll see what I can do.


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Again, a plug for the two events I'm doing in New York next week. The first is a book signing at 7 pm on October 15th at the Iinterdependence Project in the East Village. Be there!

The following two days, October 16th and 17th, we're having a two-day non-residential retreat at the Interdependence Project in the East Village. This is a terrific opportunity for anyone who wants to get a real taste of what zazen is all about. The retreat is open to beginners, no experience necessary. It will be focused on shikantaza style zazen as taught by Dogen Zenji. It's non-residential, which means you get to go out and have a night on the town in Manhattan afterward instead of being cooped up with a bunch of Zen nerds all night.


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By the way, I gotta say some of the comments on the post just below this one are really terrific. For the first time ever I have to actually recommend that folks who don;t normally look at the comments section go take a look at those.

SEXUAL PREFERENCES? SEXUAL SCHMEFERENCES!

Here's an excerpt from my new book which Shambhala Sun Space has kindly put up. The book is, of course, Sex, Sin and Zen and it's out now at fine book stores everywhere.

You'll note that the excerpt is followed by a discussion of my use of the term "sexual preferences." One of the readers takes issue with this stating:

"The term "sexual preference" belittles the agony that gays and lesbians often must go through in order to become honest with themselves and others about who they are. Many don't make it that far, and they lose their lives. Others lose their lives through murder, at the hands of psychopaths who cannot tolerate their honesty. If sexual orientation were a simple matter of preference, and if people could just choose to "be without preference," as Brad suggests, then we wouldn't see a suicide rate among gay teens that's up to four times higher than that among heterosexual teens. Most of those kids, I assure you, aren't at peace with their "preferences" -- and they would probably choose differently, at that stage, if they had the power. They have "preferences" about the kinds of clothes they wear and the music they listen to and the movies they see and the places they hang out, but sexual identity is on another order of magnitude in terms of complexity. Its causes and conditions, as far as we understand (which, frankly, isn't very far), encompass both biology and psychology, nature and nurture."

There's lots more to the discussion than that, including some comments by Rod Meade-Sperry who put the excerpt up clarifying that I do not take the view in the book that sexual orientation is simply a matter of preference. But you can jump over there and read the rest if you want. Here's my answer:

An interesting discussion! The word "preference" here is indeed unfortunate. In the portion of the book excepted above I was trying to look at the Buddhist idea of "avoiding preferences." And so I was riffing on this word. I don't believe that one chooses to be gay rather than straight the same way one chooses to order strawberry ice cream instead of vanilla. And Dennis is correct, far too many people in our culture today seem to think it's something like that.

One of the many interesting aspects of Zen practice for me personally has been the discovery that there is a tremendous amount of variety in the thoughts and desires that arise in my mind once I stop working so hard at defining myself to myself. Among the many things I discovered was the fact that my own personal sexual orientation was not a fixed and rigid thing. Since I'm the kind of person I am, the idea that I could occasionally find men sexually appealing was not really a big shock. Some of the other stuff I recognized about myself was truly disturbing. That I could be attracted to men was no big deal, especially by comparison.

The point I'm clumsily trying to get at here is that sexual orientation -- hetero, homo, bi, trans, queer, etc. -- seems to me to be just one of a big stew of things we use to constantly define and reinforce our provisional sense of self. Ultimately it's all delusion, even when it's a provisionally useful delusion. Some of it may even be true as far as it goes. But it still falls short of who we really are.

I was trained in the Zen school where we are taught not to draw a hard line between ultimate and relative truth. The party line in Zen is that ultimate and relative truth are one and the same. Dennis is right about the orders of magnitude between preferring the Ramones to Air Supply as compared to one's sexual orientation. Still, as a Zen convert I'm stuck with having to make the point that it's all relative no matter how real it seems. But then again even the undeniable fact that I am a human being living on planet Earth is, too, just relative truth (and, as such, is also absolute truth). So this is a very big topic, far more than you could possibly do justice to in the comments section of a Shambhala Sun Space blog.

In the end, though, I'm still as hetero as I ever was. As Dennis points out, it's part of my personal karma. In spite of what I found through my practice, I can't just flip to the other side through an act of will. In my own case I'm lucky that there is no societal pressure to do so. It must be really horrible when there is.

But I find I'm more personally at ease with myself because I've been able to drop some of the very hard clinging I did to my sexual identity -- among many other aspects of identity. I imagine a lot of people could do with discovering these things about themselves. This is especially true for hetero folks like me, I think. And here's why.

We need to treat everyone we meet with respect and dignity regardless of their orientation. That's for sure! I believe that the Buddhist practice can help establish that by allowing more people to see how fluid their own identity -- sexual or otherwise -- actually is. Then we cease to view others as eternally different from ourselves.

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Again, a plug for the two events I'm doing in New York next week. The first is a book signing at 7 pm on October 15th at the Iinterdependence Project in the East Village. Be there!

The following two days, October 16th and 17th, we're having a two-day non-residential retreat at the Interdependence Project in the East Village. This is a terrific opportunity for anyone who wants to get a real taste of what zazen is all about. The retreat is open to beginners, no experience necessary. It will be focused on shikantaza style zazen as taught by Dogen Zenji. It's non-residential, which means you get to go out and have a night on the town in Manhattan afterward instead of being cooped up with a bunch of Zen nerds all night.

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And I would like to thank everyone who has been making use of the donation button up on the top left corner of this page. Every little bit helps a lot. Thanks!

New York City!

Greetings and bon jour from Montreal!

Before I go any further I have to plug two events I'm doing in New York next week. The first is a book signing at 7 pm on October 15th at the Iinterdependence Project in the East Village. Swing by, get a book, get it signed, have a grand old time.

The other is a bigger event. The following two days, October 16th and 17th, we're having a two-day non-residential retreat at the Interdependence Project in the East Village. This is a terrific opportunity for anyone who wants to get a real taste of what zazen is all about. The retreat is open to beginners, no experience necessary. It will be focused on shikantaza style zazen as taught by Dogen Zenji. It's non-residential, which means you get to go out and have a night on the town in Manhattan afterward instead of being cooped up with a bunch of Zen nerds all night.

I get sick of people who hype these kinds of things as big enlightenment orgies, so I tend to downplay them and say it's boring. But, honestly, I wouldn't run so many multi-day Zen retreats unless I thought they were truly worthwhile.

You might imagine that sitting on your own at home and staring at a wall is the same thing as joining a group of people to do it. But it's really not at all. There's a power to the practice when it's done with a group that you can't find any other way. And long sittings are a way to dive deeper into the practice. It's almost impossible to find the self-discipline to do a long-form sitting alone. When you're with a group you draw upon the shared commitment of others and what was impossible becomes easy.

I really urge anyone within the area who is on the fence about this whole zen deal to come try it out for yourself in this relatively painless way. In some strange way these sittings are actually fun. You learn a lot about yourself that you never knew. I do every single time and I've been sitting gosh knows how many per year for more than half my life. DO IT!

I'll also make myself available for private talks during the weekend.

OK. So I've been doing tons of press for my new book Sex, Sin and Zen, and each time I do an interview or a talk I learn more about the book.

The reviews have been very interesting because this time even the bad reviews are exactly the kind of thing I had hoped the book would stimulate. When I first encountered the third precept, the whole "do not misuse sexuality" thing, I was confused. I'd heard right-wing Christian nut-cases talk about what they viewed as the misuses of sexuality and assumed that Buddhists must be talking about the same thing. In spite of my first teacher's attempts to make me see things differently it wasn't until I went and lived in Japan that I found out it's not the same thing at all.

The guy who interviewed me today wanted to talk some about my "voice" in my writings. He wanted to know if I deliberately stir up trouble or if that's just how I naturally am. He talked about my radical views on sexuality and whether I was airing those just to get a rise out of people.

And I thought about how I live in this kind of funny dual world. To a lot of the people I know from Suicide Girls, the punk scene, and just life in general, my views on sexuality seem positively prehistoric. They're not radical at all. I seem like a bit of a fuddy-duddy. Then I step into Buddha Nerd Land and I seem like a foul mouthed pussy-crazed heathen waving his dick around at everybody. So I figure what's really going on is that I'm treading the middle ground.

A lot of people seem fascinated by what they see as the dichotomy between how I am when I write and how I am when I speak in public or when I speak to them in person. But I don't see it that way at all. They accuse me of inventing some kind of fake hipster persona that is not the real me. I don't think I do anything of the sort.

But all of this is really terrific because what I wanted most from the book is to get people talking about stuff they haven't really been talking about. Because this stuff needs to be aired in public. There are too many wrong assumptions going on, like my assumptions about the third Buddhist precept being a call to be just like the kids at Rex Humbard Evangelical College for the Chaste and Pure.

See you in New York City!

TOUR UPDATE & MILITARY BUDDHISM

I just updated my Never Ending Tour Page. Check out a few highlights such as:

NEW YORK, NY
•October 15, 2010 (Fri) 7 pm - Talk and Book Signing at the Interdependence Project 302 3rd Floor (Middle Buzzer) New York, NY, 10012

•Oct. 16-17, 2010 (Sat - Sun) - Non-residential Zazen Retreat at the Interdependence Project 302 3rd Floor (Middle Buzzer) New York, NY, 10012

MONTREAL, QC
•October 26, 2010 (Tue) - 12 Noon Luncheon at Allen Memorial Hospital (McGill University)

•October 26, 2010 (Tues) - 7pm Casa Del Popolo 4873 boul. St. Laurent Montreal, QC

SAN FRANCISCO
• November 7-9, 2010 Dogen Translation Project at San Francisco Zen Center

LOS ANGELES, CA
•November 10, 2010 (Wed) 7pm - Against The Stream 4300 Melrose Ave. Los Angeles, CA

VENTURA, CALIFORNIA
•November 12 (Fri) - 7pm An Lac Buddhist Temple 901, S.Saticoy Avenue Ventura, CA 93004.

LOS ANGELES, CA
•November 14, 2010 (Sun) 7pm - Bodhi Tree Bookstore 8585 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, CA

You have been told! Now you have no excuse to miss any of these!

I am in upstate New York for a couple nights, Spencertown to be precise. I'm not really certain exactly where I am. The GPS guided me here, just like the star guided those three kings long ago. Next stop in Montreal where I'll be basing myself ro the next 4-6 weeks (with side trips indicated above).

I gotta go make myself some food or I'm gonna starve.

Here's an email I just responded to:

I'm an officer in the military and I'm at a sort of crossroads in my career path. I used to be a fighting troop when I was younger - I was all gung ho about that 'fight for your country' stuff. Now, I'm being offered to go back to the fighting units and lead fighting soldiers.

Somewhere in all that, I discovered Zen, and the whole right livelihood thing is a concern for me. I understand that there aren't hard and fast rules, and that everyone has to figure things out for their personal situations. At the same time, I have come to understand the value of the 'do not take life' thing in and of itself, and not as some commandment. I want to ease suffering, and not to cause it. I don't want to hurt people. But at the same time, I know that things aren't ever that simple in the real world, and that is a lot of good that can be done by soldiers for physically protecting people who can't protect themselves. It's a difficult dilemma. In terms of violent human conflict, I don't see a lot of realistic solutions. If you choose to defend people, you will have to kill people. If you choose to stay out of it, those people you were going to defend may die anyways. If everyone lays down their weapons - well, that'd be great, but realistically, it ain't gonna happen. So where's the solution?

MY ANSWER (for what it's worth):

You're right. It's a dilemma.

The military is necessary. No doubt about that. Anyone who argues otherwise is just deluded and overly idealistic.Since if this is so, actual people have to serve in the military and they have to be trained to kill when needed.

If you do something that is necessary to society, that is right livelihood. Serving in the military is right livelihood. Absolutely.

Most of us agree that it would be nice if there was no need for the military, if the whole world were stable and at peace and that peace didn't need to be defended by deadly force. But we are not there now. Peace has to be defended by people who are trained to kill those who would destroy it. I'm sorry. But that's the way things are.

I wish this was not true. And I can wish all I want but that won't make it so.

The way to change things is to take the real situation and make it better. If Buddhist teachers are telling people military service is not right livelihood, they are standing in the way of the day when real peace finally prevails. The more people in the military who have a Zen practice, or some kind of meditation, the better.

I'm glad there are people like you in the military. I wish there were more.

As to what to do at the moment when you're required to take someone's life to defend someone else, it's too abstract to me to be able to say anything useful. I think at that moment you know whether to pull the trigger or not. Your practice will help you clarify this.

ZEN CELEBRITY AND ECONOMICS

I've been reading the comments section here more often lately than before and it's been interesting to note that some readers are complaining that I talk too much here about my self and the issues of spiritual celebrity and don't deliver enough of what they call "the Dharma."

I already know enough not to take what I see in the comments section as the majority opinion of what I write here. I get something like a thousand hits a day. So even when there are 500 comments that still represents far fewer people than are actually reading. Yet it is interesting that people say this. Because I tend to feel completely the opposite.

I tend to write about things that I want to read about but which I don't see anyone else writing about. So I write about spiritual celebrity not because I think I'm so god damned interesting and everybody wants to read about my exploits, but because I think the subject itself is very interesting and no one else seems willing to say anything about it.

Spiritual celebrity is a huge business these days. Look at guys like the Dalai Lama, Eckhart Tolle, Thich Nhat Hahn, Gempo "slimebag" Roshi, etc., etc., etc. These guys make weenies like me look like... I dunno... maybe like Zero Defex as compared to Green Day. Guys like this have "people." Like in the sense of "have your people call my people and we'll do lunch." They've got entourages to keep the fans at bay. They've got limos to drive them to the airport. They're flying first class. Yet I've never seen any of them talking about the issues involved in all of that. Maybe they do and I'm just not paying attention. But I doubt it.

Spiritual celebrity-hood isn't something new either. Yogananda was a big star in the mid 20th century. Krishnamurti too. Dogen was well known in his day and Buddha was said to have attracted thousands to his talks. What was up with that?

Maybe it's just me. But I'm always interested in the nuts and bolts stuff much more than in the airy fairy philosophical side of things. Even my fascination with Japanese monster movies is much more a fascination with how they were created than with the movies themselves. When I get a DVD I always watch the "making of" bonus materials before I watch the film. Sometimes I don't even watch the film at all.

As for "the Dharma," to me all of this stuff is the Dharma. It's every bit as much the Dharma as the more philosophical matters. And, don't worry your pretty little heads, I plan to get more into the philosophical stuff in the new Safe For Work Suicide Girls column I'll be starting soon.

But this stuff is what drives the Dharma. This is how it gets out there to the people who need it. It is all bound up in the same thing. It is the Dharma.

I had a funny conversation with Nishijima Roshi on the eve of the publication of Hardcore Zen. I said, "Once this book comes out, if it sells well I'll become famous. Doesn't that go against what Dogen says about not seeking fame and profit?"

He said something like, "Dogen was talking about seeking fame and profit. You didn't write the book with the objective of becoming rich and famous. Sometimes you do something sincere and people like it, then fame and money come. In that case you deal with the real situation as it comes up."

Well I haven't become rich, nor even that famous. But a certain degree of fame (and no degree of profit, at least not yet) has followed. Well, what does one do about that? How do you keep your head as a Buddhist practitioner? Do you run away? Many people in my position have. Do you fall head first into fame and money and forget your practice? Again, many have done this too.

I have been trying to see if there's a middle way. Spending a month in Tassajara recently was a way of trying to radically reconnect with Zen. I'm still trying to see if the effort was successful or not. Based on my experience of Tassajara and of coming back into the world after, I'm starting to understand the vast difference between enforced discipline and discipline that comes from oneself. But that may be a whole 'nother topic.

The economics of being a Zen teacher are both frustrating and fascinating. Take, for example, the matter of getting a "real job." When I started writing about Zen I had a 5-day a week, 10-6 job. But because of that I could not do things like lead multi-day sesshins or run off to Europe for two months to talk Buddhism to the people of Poland and Finland and Ireland and all those other lands over there. I also couldn't devote several hours a day to pure writing practice.

Now people want me to do those things. But about half of those who extend such invitations have no clue about the nuts and bolts economics involved. They imagine, for example, that I'm making loads of money from book sales. Not true. My advances are about 1/3 of what my salary was when I had a "real job" and the market will only realistically bear about one book every two years from me. So I'm now making about 1/6 what I used to. It really is not enough to sustain one person. Thank gosh I don't have a family to support!

So there are people out there who want me to come and lead three-day retreats and yet do not understand when I start talking about how the event is going to be financed, particularly when it comes to how I will get paid. Maybe they think the Dharma should be free. And it should! But rent and utilities are not free. So the choice seems to be find a way to make money from the Dharma or just stop.

The most common solution to this dilemma is to create a communal base of support for the teacher. You start something like San Francisco Zen Center or Plum Village or whatever and a lot of people with "real jobs" contribute some of their money to allow the teacher to do her or his thing without having to get a "real job."

This may not be a viable option in my case because I'm just too damned anti-social. I mean, I like people and all. But I really chafe at all of the things it takes to hold together a community.

So I'm testing out other options. Sometimes I entertain vague dreams that Sex Sin And Zen will sell in the same tonnage as The Power of Now or the latest book of ghost-written musings by Great Master What's His Face (I just talked to a guy who ghost writes books for some spiritual master dude who gets $15,000 as his standard speaking fee, I write all my books myself, thank you, and my speaking fee is a whole lot less than that). Then I could be independent and do what I need to do that way. Hence all the annoying self-promotion (and if you think you're annoyed by it, imagine what it's like to have to actually do it!).

One of the people I met at Tassajara and talked to about this stuff had been involved in promoting spiritual masters before. He told me the secret was to include what he called a "promise." You have to tell folks they're gonna get something of value from coming to your talk or seminar. That's a tough one for me because I'm so steeped in the "Zen is good for nothing" tradition established by Sawaki Roshi. So maybe I'm screwed.

Anyway, I leave you with the photo above which proves positive that zazen has given me the power of levitation (click on the photo to get a larger version and see for yourself). If you want the secret of levitation use the "donate" button on the upper left of this blog.

Reviewing My Reviewers

I forgot to mention that Tricycle magazine's blog noticed the buzz that Sex, Sin And Zen was getting and put up this article about it. Neat.

Also, I got a notice in Scene magazine, the very same mag where I found the ad that Zero Defex placed for a bass player back a million years ago. And speaking of Zero Defex, we're playing again on Tuesday night at Annabelle's in Akron for anyone who missed the show at the Kent Stage on Saturday.

It was an amazing show, by the way. If you missed it, too bad...

REVIEWS OF SSZ and TOUR DATES

First thing is, I just added a bunch of new dates to my 2010 World Domination Tour.

Second thing is if you're in or near Oakland you are hereby ordered to come see my book signing and talk tonight at Diesel Books at 7 pm.

Third thing is, as some of you have already discovered, my talks at Tassajara are now available on line. Here's where you can find them:

OMG: Dogen's Concept of God

Understanding the Shobogenzo

Fourth thing is, there are now some very nice reviews and excepts from my new book SIN...

I'm Back!

I'm baaaack!

Last night I did my first book signing for Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between (get yours now). I was at East/West Books in Mountain View, California.

Tomorrow night (Sept. 17th) at 7 pm I will be at Copperfield's Books in Petaluma, California.

On September 20th at 7 pm I'll be at Diesel Books in Oakland.

I'll also be on Henry Tannenbaum's show on San Francisco's KRON channel 4 on Sunday morning (Sept. 19th) at aroun...

DONE AT GREAT SKY, NEXT STOP TASSAJARA

Man it was hot at the Great Sky sesshin! And the mosquitoes were vicious beyond belief. You'd spray yourself with more bug poison than any human should ever apply to his skin and they would still bite. I have little red splotches up and down my legs even now, two days later. Whenever I'd go to the outhouse as soon as that one portion of my body that was not doused with bug spray was exposed they'd be right there trying to take a bite. I had to admire their tenacity.

There's an old Zen saying, ...

THOSE WERE DIFFERENT TIMES

I've been driving a lot the past few days. Yesterday was five hours. Today I have another four. Tomorrow I got five or six more. Then I'll be cloistered away from all this Internet noise for a while.

Anyway, to keep me awake while driving I downloaded some podcasts including one called Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. I had to download it just for the title alone. But it turns out it's really good.

The two podcasts I listened to yesterday got me thinking about the Buddhist view of its own ancient...